Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      ‘Rock Me, Joe’: 9 Songs With Great Guitar Cues

      by

      Celebrate the timeless rock ‘n’ roll tradition of a lead singer cuing up a guitarist by listening to tracks from the Pixies, the Runaways and Jimi Hendrix.Black Francis of the Pixies showed love to bandmates.Rob Verhorst/RedfernsDear listeners,It would be difficult for me to pick a favorite moment on the Pixies’ bizarro 1989 masterpiece “Doolittle” — a consistent favorite album of mine since I first heard it as a 15-year-old who had very recently learned what “Un Chien Andalou” was. But if you insist, I’ll zoom into the album’s dead center, in the middle of Track 7, when the lead singer Black Francis issues a command from the eye of the storm, intoning like his life depended on it, “Rock me, Joe.” On cue, the band’s guitarist Joey Santiago then lets out a brief but thoroughly face-melting solo.This is the Pixies’ take on one of my favorite little rock ’n’ roll traditions: A lead singer saying something cool to a guitarist in order to cue up a solo. Today’s playlist is a celebration of this time-honored custom, containing nine variations on this theme.In “Monkey Gone to Heaven” (and several other tracks on this playlist, from the Runaways, MC5 and Gram Parsons) a solo cue is a way for a vocalist to shout out a guitarist by name, sharing a fleeting bit of the spotlight. Other times, as on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “The Losing End (When You’re On),” it’s a way of getting some spontaneous energy onto a studio track. I’ve even included two tracks where the singer cues himself to solo, in third person. Talk about multitasking.Consider this your cue to press play.Guitar!,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Pixies: “Monkey Gone to Heaven”This is one of the great solo throws of all time. It’s also worth mentioning that in the version of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” that appears on the live radio compilation “Pixies at the BBC,” Francis offers a slight variation: “Rock me, Joseph Alberto Santiago.” Just in case there was any confusion as to which Joe he was talking to.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Met Opera’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Yuval Sharon Will Team Up for ‘Ring’

      by

      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, will extend his contract and lead Wagner’s four-opera epic, in a production staged by Yuval Sharon.Wagner’s “Ring” cycle is a mammoth undertaking for any opera company: a four-opera, 15-hour epic that features a cast of warriors, gods, giants and dwarves and some of the most daunting music in the repertoire.The Metropolitan Opera said on Tuesday that it would again stage opera’s most ambitious work, starting in the 2027-28 season, the company’s first new production of the “Ring” cycle in nearly two decades. And a familiar face will be on the podium: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director since 2018, who is extending his contract through 2030.The production, which will be staged by the visionary theater director Yuval Sharon, is to feature the soprano Lise Davidsen, one of opera’s brightest stars, as Brünnhilde.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said the company had decided to stage a new “Ring” in part for Nézet-Séguin.“Every music director of a major opera company expects and deserves to have a ‘Ring’ cycle,” he said. “It’s the crowning achievement, the biggest thing you can do in opera.”Nézet-Séguin, 49, whose new contract covers a six-year term, said he was looking forward to the “Ring,” calling it an “extremely intimate affair.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      The World Is Still Catching Up to the Music of Hector Berlioz

      by

      Hector Berlioz did not have the twilight of a great composer.In his memoirs, he described himself in his 60s as “past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions.” His extraordinary but unusual music was unloved and unplayed; a widower two times over, he was lonely, and hated people more than ever. He wrote, with a shake of his fist at the sky: “I say hourly to Death, ‘When you will.’ Why does he delay?”He felt wronged by the public and his fellow composers, who even when they admired him didn’t know what to do with his music, or his personality. Wagner wrote that Berlioz didn’t trust anyone’s opinion, and seemed to enjoy isolation, dooming him to “remain forever incomplete and perhaps really shine only as a transient, marvelous exception.”Berlioz had faith that his time would come, though. By his estimate, things would pick up for him if he could just live to 140. He made it to 65.But he wasn’t wrong. After his death, in 1869, some of his works, like the “Symphonie Fantastique,” became firmly entrenched in the canon, and he is the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, which begins on Aug. 9. Still, two weeks’ worth of concerts and panel discussions, as well as a companion collection of essays, can only begin to capture the breadth of Berlioz’s artistry.There is Berlioz the composer, of course, but also Berlioz the critic, the conductor, the impresario, the philosopher and the literary author. A focus on his music alone is just as dizzying: Nearly every work defies conventional analysis and taxonomy, and must be approached on its own terms.His idiosyncratic music didn’t truly catch on until the mid-20th century, and even then fitfully. His operas remain too difficult to stage regularly, and many of his concert works are too strange to program or market to audiences. It feels as though we are still catching up to Berlioz’s pipe-dream visions of musical possibility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Walter Arlen, Holocaust Refugee and Belated Composer, Is Dead at 103

      by

      After fleeing Vienna, he was a music critic and teacher before returning to composing in the 1980s. His memories of Nazi barbarism inspired his music.Walter Arlen, a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song, died on Sept. 3, 2023, in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 103. The death, in a hospital, was not widely reported at the time; Howard Myers, Mr. Arlen’s husband and sole survivor, confirmed it to The New York Times only recently. Mr. Arlen and Mr. Myers, longtime residents of Santa Monica, had been companions for 65 years and were married in 2008 after California’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriages.Even after eight decades, Mr. Arlen’s memories remained vivid — of his father being dragged off to a concentration camp; of his mother’s nervous breakdown and suicide; of his family’s home, business and bank accounts stolen by the Nazi authorities; and of witnessing the vicious murder of an older Jew by an SS guard.The scion of a prosperous Jewish family that had owned a department store in Vienna since 1890, Mr. Arlen, whose family name was Aptowitzer, was an 18-year-old high school student in 1938, nearing graduation with a brilliant musical future ahead, when German troops invaded and absorbed German-speaking Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in what was known as the Anschluss.As waves of Nazi violence and property expropriations crushed Jewish life across Austria, the department store was seized and “Aryanized,” the family was evicted from its apartments on the top floor, and Walter’s father was sent to a series of concentration camps, ending at Buchenwald. Walter, his mother and his younger sister, Edith, took refuge in a pensione.Mr. Arlen and his sister, Edith Arlen-Wachtel, visited Vienna, their native city, in March 2008 for the first time since their family fled Nazi-occupied Austria.Christian Fürst/Picture-Alliance/DPA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How Ella Jenkins Revolutionized Children’s Music

      by

      Over seven decades, she brought a world of genres and ideas to songs for the young. On her centennial, what she would really like to do is perform again.When Ella Jenkins began recording young people’s music in the 1950s and ’60s, her albums featured tracks that many of that era’s parents and teachers would probably never have dreamed of playing for children: a love chant from North Africa. A Mexican hand-clapping song. A Maori Indian battle chant. And even “Another Man Done Gone,” an American chain-gang lament whose lyrics she changed, turning it into a freedom cry.“She found this way of introducing children to sometimes very difficult topics and material, but with a kind of gentleness,” said Gayle Wald, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jenkins. “She never lied to them. She certainly never talked down to them.”Jenkins’s unorthodox approach became a huge success: She is the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, surpassing even such stalwarts of the label as Woody Guthrie and her friend Pete Seeger. A champion of diversity long before the term became popular, Jenkins helped revolutionize music for the young, purposefully encouraging Black children.Jenkins at a Grammy ceremony where she received a special honor.R. Diamond/WireImageIn addition to introducing global material, which she often recorded with children’s choruses, she wrote original, interactive compositions like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” now part of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.“Before Ella, very few people actually composed for children,” Wald said in a video interview.You might think that Jenkins, who will celebrate her 100th birthday on Tuesday, would now want to relax and savor her many accolades, among them lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and ASCAP, the music licensing agency, as well as a designation as a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow. But in a brief telephone conversation from her home in an assisted-living center in Chicago, she seemed unconcerned with plans for her centenary in the city, which include a Tuesday morning celebration with young students from the Old Town School of Folk Music, and a showcase on Wednesday with performances by children from Kids on the Move Summer Camp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Lincoln Center’s Rebranded Orchestra Settles Into Its Debut Season

      by

      Compared with previous seasons, recent concerts by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center were refreshingly casual, but also more mixed.With a new name and a new music director, Lincoln Center’s summer orchestra is getting a fresh start this season. On the evidence of three concerts over the past week and a half, though, the newly minted Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center is turning its focus to an element that has always been there: the players themselves.Last year was the final summer of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which for 21 years had been led by the beloved Louis Langrée. The renamed ensemble’s music director, Jonathon Heyward, was a companionable host recently at the first concert of its season, which allowed audience members to vote on the pieces they’d like to hear. Between movements, Heyward called on a few players at their music stands to talk about their love of the composers. Some remarks seemed well-rehearsed, others extemporaneous. But all of them were sweet.There has been some worry about the organization’s legacy — that change represents a repudiation of the orchestra’s repertoire and mission. At his final concerts, Langrée himself pleaded with the audience to return and support the players.This year, the onstage conversations felt calculated to build a rapport between the players and the audience. Attendees were also invited to mingle with the musicians in the lobby of David Geffen Hall after each concert. All that talking had an interesting outcome: It left me more invested in individual musicians when they eventually played.Kazem Abdullah led a program that included Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Benjamin Beilman as the soloist.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterAs in years past, each program was performed twice on consecutive nights. Avoiding heavy material, the concerts felt like a linen suit designed for comfort, ease and a touch of class on balmy days. There’s still substance, but it comes in the pleasing form of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann (a Heyward favorite), rather than the portentous, densely textured works of Mahler and Strauss.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      An 18th-Century Phenom Arrives at Lincoln Center

      by

      The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Marianna Martines’s Symphony in C, a milestone for a composer whose music mostly fell silent after her death.The composer Marianna Martines grew up in Vienna when the city was teeming with towering figures in classical music. Haydn was her neighbor and teacher. Mozart sought her out as a duet partner.Born in 1744, Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent, a fate shared by so many female composers of her era.This week, though, the Summer for the City festival at Lincoln Center will perform Martines’s Symphony in C major (1770), a work composed decades before it was common for women to write orchestral music. The performances are a significant step in the reclamation of her music.“It was an easy decision to present this fantastic piece,” said Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. “The whole piece is filled with wonderful interplay within the strings and the wind parts.” The first movement, he added, “is light and spirited.”The pianist Sandra Mogensen found similar qualities in Martines’s piano music, calling it “sparkly, wonderful and vibrant.” She and her colleague Erica Sipes have played through all of Martines’s available keyboard works as part of Piano Music She Wrote, an online project they founded in 2020 to encourage performances of public domain piano music by women. Martines’s Piano Sonata in A major (1765) was one of the first pieces Sipes recorded. “It pulled me in,” she said. “Every movement has something different to say.”This past spring, Elizabeth Schauer, director of choral activities at the University of Arizona, led what was likely the first performance since Martines’s death of her Mass No. 3 (1761). When she wrote it, “she was only 17,” Schauer said. “My students and I found it astonishing and beautiful.” Schauer used a new score reconstructed by her student James Higgs from manuscripts. For Higgs, Martines’s style reflects her teachers and supporters in Vienna, who were Italian.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      How Did Flavor Flav Become a Hype Man for the U.S. Women’s Water Polo Team?

      by

      The rapper has become a self-appointed hype man and benefactor to the U.S. women’s team in Paris. He plans to keep the poolside party going into 2028.As the robed members of the U.S. women’s water polo team stood single file at the pool’s edge before their match against Italy at the Paris Olympics, the rapper Flavor Flav stood directly across from them, clapping while the announcer at the Aquatics Centre in St.-Denis, France, listed the American players’ names one by one. He made a heart gesture with his hands.For the rest of the match, he rarely sat. Wearing a personalized water polo cap and jersey and a dessert-plate-size clock on a chain around his neck — all of them red, white and blue — America’s newest (and perhaps most unlikely) water polo fan leaned nervously against a glass barrier and shouted encouragement.Whenever the United States scored, he raised his wrists — both were adorned with big-faced watches — and shouted gleefully. He does not care if the players cannot hear him, he said; he prefers that they focus on their assignments anyway.“They know deep down in their hearts and they know way in the back of their mind that Flav is right there for us,” he said in an interview at a hospitality venue in Paris after the game.In an Olympics in which Snoop Dogg has seemed ubiquitous, a women’s rugby player has recruited an N.F.L. superfan and Parisian fans have lost their minds, the relationship between a team of women’s water polo players and a 65-year-old rapper from Long Island might rank as just another curious pairing. Except it’s not: When it comes to water polo, Flavor Flav is quick to remind anyone, he is all in.The United States beat Italy, 10-3, in a group match on Wednesday. The team then beat France, 17-5, to close pool play with a 3-1 record.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More